Word: aback
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...those things are so fundamentally important, I was taken aback when they were questioned,” he said...
Every now and again, Father Spagnolia said something that really took me aback. He said that Cardinal Law, whom he had been criticizing from the pulpit for weeks, was not a Christian. He said that when Law's delegate, Father Charles J. Higgins, confronted him on Feb. 20 with the allegation that 31 years ago he had twice sexually molested a 14-year-old boy, "I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. My reaction was, I think, 'You're s____ing me.'" When we discussed his 19-year hiatus from the active priesthood, a time when...
...looking for fresh material. A friend of the promoter's comes backstage wearing a shaggy black coat, and immediately Williams is all over her, making barking noises, "look, she is wearing a poodle," then becoming a haughty French grande dame giving fashion commentary. The woman is taken aback and then starts laughing. The stagehands are laughing. Williams is loosening up the only way he knows how: by cracking other people...
...Clark is no stranger to controversy. An ardent promoter of new writing through his Out Of Joint company, he brought to the stage such succès de scandale as Mark Ravenhill's 1996 hit about sex and consumerism, Shopping and F______. Even he, though, may have been taken aback by the furor that has attended his latest project: Sebastian Barry's Hinterland, a co-production between Out Of Joint, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and London's Royal National Theatre...
...Some of you were taken aback by the cover image of the White House illuminated against an apparently ever darkening shroud of dusk. "I had to double-check the date on the cover," wrote a Colorado reader after experiencing a sense of deja vu. "For a minute there I thought we were back at the Clinton White House." "Your cover would have passed the bias test if it had substituted the Capitol building for the White House," suggested a New Jerseyan, "as both Democrats and Republicans were beneficiaries of Enron's greed." A Nebraskan pressed her charge more bluntly...